David Spates "Therefore I Am" Published Feb. 15, 2005

Where did all this junk come from?

I have stuff stacked to the ceiling in my garage, not to mention all the junk in my former workout room, which slowly morphed into a storage room for all the junk we don't use anymore. We are in dire need of a garage sale. If I were smart and had lots of free time, I'd sort through it all and detail each individual item on eBay. I'd make a lot more money than I would in a garage sale, but a garage sale is a lot easier and quicker. I just want my garage and workout room back.

But where did all of this junk come from? I don't recall ever making frivolous, silly buys. It couldn't have been me. When I make a purchase, it's always very deliberate and considered. I think about an items price vs. its value, and then I make my purchasing decision. I don't ever buy junk. Do I?

Of course I do. Junk doesn't materialize in our homes. To mangle an old saying, today's junk is yesterday's treasure. Today I go to the store, find an item I can't possibly live without and then, like a proud hunter emerging from the savanna with his trophy, I come home and place my shiny new treasure in its special place. There it will perform whatever function it can, and I smile. Tomorrow is different. Tomorrow or the next day or the next month or year or decade, I see my prize and think, "What is this? Who put it here? It's just in the way. I'll put it in the garage until I can find a better place for it." Yeah, right.

And in the garage it stays until one day I can't open a car door without knocking over a pile of junk. It's garage sale time. It's way past garage sale time. Now the treasure I had once paid full retail price for, not to mention city and county sales taxes, stands rejected on an old card table with makeshift cardboard sign that reads, "Everything on table 25¢."

And the final irony is that I'll take the pitiful proceeds from the garage sale and use them to go out and, you guessed it, buy more stuff which, in a few months or years or decades, will be garage sale fodder.

George Carlin said it well: "That's all you need in life, a little place for your stuff. That's all your house is: A place to keep your stuff. If you didn't have so much stuff, you wouldn't need a house. You could just walk around all the time. A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it."

For many people, however, a "pile of stuff with a cover on it" doesn't suffice. They need two piles at least. I read that self-storage is now a $17 billion a year industry. We've all seen them. They are those ugly, fenced-in rows of long warehouses that everyone uses but no one wants to live next to.

I used to think that the people who built and owned mini-warehouses did so because they had some land that probably wasn't good for much else. Maybe the land was out near the airport or on the wrong side of town or maybe out in the boonies where no one wanted to go. They'd build their mini-warehouses and, if they were lucky, maybe they'd bring in enough cash to pay the property tax bill.

It's thinking like that proves I am not entrepreneur material. These folks are doing a lot better than just covering their county tax -- $17,000,000,000 better. As long as we continue to buy junk (let's skip the self-delusional "treasure" part and go straight to inevitable "junk" label), mini-warehouse owners will rake it in.

But it's the American way, right? Money is made to be spent. You can save it for a while, but eventually you're going to lift up the mattress and spend that wad of cash. There's nothing wrong with that. Spending is what keeps the economy churning. If there's no spending, there's no production, and this country's ability to produce goods and services is what has transformed it into the world's leading economic force. In fact, you could argue that it's your patriotic duty to buy more junk.

I for one am leaving right now to go buy stuff. I need some "Garage Sale" signs. They're a lot cheaper than renting out a mini-warehouse.

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David Spates is a Knoxville resident and Crossville Chronicle contributor whose column is published each Tuesday. He can be reached at davespates@chartertn.net.